Here's the second installment of my explanation of how hard and soft transitions work with Alien Jon's concept of arcs and loops. Here I demo all the permutations of these transitions through the intratangent circles (concentric) versus extratangent circles (outside--btw, if any mathematicians know what these concepts are actually called, please let me know) for a bunch of different circle sizes.

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The first installment of a short series of vids on transitions between unit circle patterns, antispin flowers, and extensions. What the common elements are and how to switch between them. Most of this vid is defining basic vocabulary and providing basic examples of the concepts that will be explored in later videos. A major debt for this is owed to Alien Jon, whose concepts of arcs and loops is one of, if not the critical underpinning of these concepts.

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Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.

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 After working through trying to do a mode change in same direction with Charlie's 9-square theory, I came up with an interesting solution that involves using soft transitions across a unit circle grid to switch between box and diamond mode. The idea for this is centered on isopops from hooping and more specifically how you can change circle size by treating them as adjacent circles rather than dilations of the same circle. Included is a demo of how this technique can be used to switch between iso vs cateye antibrid to static vs triquetra antibrid to iso vs extension and back again.

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This past week, Zan posted a great video on diagonal planes that included an exercise that does an amazing job of cleaning up diagonals--seriously, well done :) Playing with diagonals has me thinking about having planes offset by degree differences other than 0, 90 or 180, and here is an example of plane switching between planes at are offset by degrees based in 3 or 5 rather than 4. Next, over the weekend, Chris Rovo showed me a pattern he'd been working on wherein an atomic flower switches to atomic weave and over to another atomic flower.

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A couple updates from moves of the past week: a quarter-time float out of the now-familiar stall-switch pattern and learning how to plane-shift in same direction. This leads to an atomic weave performed in diagonal planes, which I demo a variant of the Notcoleman3 in here. Finally, a couple thoughts on "hard" versus "soft" transitions based upon charlicopter's 9-square poi theory videos. There is definitely some potential here and I like the idea of moving between grids as well as adding pendulums into the mix.

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First up, I have a new website that is now hosting all my videos and minutia: please visit me on the web at http://www.drexfactor.com

Next, a quick update to last week's musings on hybrid theory. A possible hole and a fix to it...beyond that, a reply from Alien Jon got my creative juices flowing and here are five results of thinking of CAPs as segments of motion and hybrids as opposing versions of the same types of motion. These are awkward but I can see a lot of possibilities as to where thinking of motion this way could lead.

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Thanks to Insignia's excellent post on hybrids, I've spent the past week reexamining the concept and working through some of the logical conundrums it presents. I find the idea of a hybrid being "a combination of two driving styles" problematic because I can't find a definition for driving style that isn't loose enough that potentially any type of movement could be considered a driving style. I think there is a simpler way to define them and it is presented here. Please please send me feedback on this one--let me know if this definition makes sense.

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This past week, Insignia posted a note to Facebook trying to map out all hybrids by matching up all the driving styles he knew of: isolation, extension, cateye, antispin, pendulum, and CAP and going through them one-by-one till he'd identified all the combinations possible between them. Here is a demo of all the hybrids he listed (though I just realized I forgot cateye vs. CAP--whoops). Some of these have an interesting aesthetic value to them while some are just an utter pain in the ass.

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Starting off with an update on the pattern I showed off last week. Insignia had posted a comment about plane-bending in and out of it and here is a demo of the combination he mentioned. Also, I got a request for a demo of a cateye flower a couple weeks ago and here are four extrapolations of the idea. Ultimately one can look at this concept as either a flower with multiple points of rotation or as a variant on the unit circle grid idea. Please share thoughts on this as I haven't seen it demoed before.

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